Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Story #1 is
today’s sign of desperation from the Obama Campaign.#2 is another example of desperation.#3 Obama's claim to fame. #4 New Romney Ad, #5 looks at 10 things Liberals misunderstand, #6 Liberal fascism is on display with Chick-fil-A. #7 questions if Obama is at his peak now in the polls, #8 is about the Republicans the Democrats fear most, and #9 looks at leftist thuggery in our schools.

Today’s
Thoughts

“I wish you to be successful,
because this success is needed to the United States, of course, but to Europe
and the rest of the world, too,” Walesa
told Romney at the end of their meeting Monday. “Gov. Romney, get your success — be successful!”In the meantime, Obama has a similar endorsement from Castro’s daughter and Hugo Chavez.

What in the world did Obama mean when he said, "I believe that the way you grow the
economy is from the middle out. I believe in fighting for the middle class
because if they're prospering all of us will prosper"?I
doubt he knows.

“It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s
just that they know so many things that
aren’t so.” —Ronald Reagan

1. Signs of Desperation

President Obama’s political fate could be sealed by
mid-August, when the Olympic games end,
according to the latest urgent
fundraising plea from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).

“In 100 days, voters nationwide will
pull the lever for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney,” wrote Robby Mook, the DCCC
executive director. “But by the time the
Olympic games are over, the outcome could already be decided.”

The London Olympics end on August
12th. “Every time an Ohio or Florida voter turns on their TV, they’re seeing
Republican Super PAC ads trashing President Obama and our Democratic
candidates,” he explained.

Another desperate appeal for money by the Obama Campaign
shows how shameless and desperate the campaign is.

2. Another sign of desperation:Romney’s a Wimp

Rush Limbaugh riffed on the new Newsweek
cover today:

Calling Romney a
wimp is aimed at suppressing the white blue-collar vote. Blue-collar voters hate wimps. You know, the working white
voters that Obama has abandoned, and now whose votes they're trying to suppress, this is all about trying to make
those people think that Romney is a wuss....

Rush goes on to say that if anyone's a
wuss, it's Obama:

We've all seen Obama throw a baseball. He looks
not even as good as an average girl throwing a baseball....

That is: You want to talk about who's
wussiest? We'll crush you. We'll knock you down and cut off your hair...

But what I'd like to say is: Attacking a man as "wussy" is
homophobic. Do the Democrats care about gay people or not? The effort to label
Romney a "wimp" is a betrayal of liberal values. It's
hypocritical.

Another negative attack that will fail.What the left seems incapable of
understanding is that they are at the point where additional accusation sound
shrill and hurt Obama more than Romney.Obama is losing his likeability and that was pretty much all he had
left.

3. Another reason for Obama to be nervous

..Obama said he was reminded of the
following story involving a young family
that was understandably "very excited" at the mere sight of an
Obama photo:

"This does also remind me of
the season that we’re in. Jim Messina tells this story, my campaign
manager. He was in some event, and this young couple who was there with their
adorable four-year-old son, and I guess there was a picture of me somewhere,
and so they were very excited.

"They said, 'Sammy, who’s
that?' And he said, 'That's Barack
Obama.' 'And what does Barack Obama do?' And the boy thinks for a second
and he says, 'He approves this message.'"

Obama laughed and so did his
wealthy audience. Because its members could afford to hear a different message
straight from the source.

But no one, least of all Barack
Obama, seemed struck by the fact that after all this time and all this money the only thing an
American youngster in 2012 knows about the current President of the United
States is that he approves the message in a political TV ad.
And this oblivious Chicago South Sider finds that worth sharing publicly…

Obama should be worried.His campaign is spending a lot of money but they aren’t scoring with
their ads.Unfortunately for him, most
people probably only remember that he approved the ad and it was NEGATIVE.

1) Being Open Minded: To a liberal, this has nothing at all to do with seriously
considering other people's ideas. To the contrary, liberals define being "open-minded" as agreeing with them.
What could be more close-minded than assuming that not only are you right, but
that you don't even need to consider another viewpoint because anyone who
disagrees must be evil?

2) Racism: Liberals start with the presumption that only white people who don't belong to the
Democratic Party can be racist. So, for example, even if Jeremiah Wright
can make it clear that he hates white people because of their skin color or if
liberals take an explicitly racist political position, like suggesting that
black people are too stupid and incompetent to get identification to vote, they
can't be racist. White Republicans, on
the other hand, are generally assumed to be racist by default, no matter how
much evidence there is to the contrary.

3) Fairness: In all fairness, I must admit that fairness is an arbitrary
concept. So, you could make the argument that no one could get
"fairness" wrong. Still, liberals do because they don't make any
effort to actually "be fair." As a practical matter, liberals define
"fairness" as taking as much as possible from people who they don't
think are going to vote for them and giving it to people who may vote for them
in return for their ill gotten largesse. Certainly conservatives, libertarians,
and moderates might disagree about how much money to take from the wealthy to
redistribute to the poor or how to help the disadvantaged, but the only liberal answer to the question, "How
much is enough?" is "more."

4) Greed:To a liberal,
believing that you pay too much in taxes or even opposing paying more in taxes
is greedy. In actuality, wanting to loot as much money as possible that
someone else has earned to use for your own purposes, which is what liberals
do, is a much better example of greed.

5) Hate: Liberals often define
simple disagreement with them on issues like gay marriage, tax rates, or
abortion as hatred. No matter how well a position is explained, or the
logical underpinnings behind it, it's chalked up to hate. Meanwhile, the angriest, most vicious, most hateful
people in all of politics are liberals railing against what they say is
"hatred." This irony is completely lost on the Left….

Liberals don’t understand that when they call someone a
bigot they are committing bigotry.They
say being bigoted against bigotry is not bigotry.And they don’t have a clue how ridiculous
they sound.

6. Liberal Fascism

The past two weeks have brought to light a truly disturbing political
demonstration — and it has nothing to do with presidential elections or generic
congressional ballots. At least three
mayors in some of America's largest cities, as well as plenty of other city
officials, have publicly demanded political orthodoxy as a condition of doing
business in their metropolises. Political
correctness has transformed into a strange American version of fascism —
over a chicken filet sandwich and an opinion about marriage that even our
Democratic president officially held as recently as two months ago.
The story so far: Fast-food outlet Chick-fil-A started operations 45 years
ago in the South, and has been expanding ever since. The owners have a
well-known and widely publicized commitment to their Christian faith; Chick-fil-A stores remain closed on Sundays
to celebrate the Christian Sabbath. Chick-fil-A's mission clearly
underscores those values, as well as traditional customer service goals: "To glorify God by being a faithful
steward of all that is entrusted to us. To have a positive influence on all who
come in contact with Chick-fil-A."…

…Based on CNN's spin, politicians in several large American cities attempted
to disprove Cathy's notion of a free country in which people can operate their
businesses regardless of their religion or political point of view. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino sent a letter to
Cathy stating that "[t]here is no place for discrimination on Boston's
Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it." (Chick-fil-A's
website explicitly states that they do not discriminate on the basis of sexual
orientation in employment or in commerce, by the way.) A few days later, Mernino had to retract that statement after
belatedly discovering that mayors and cities can't discriminate on the basis of
political or religious belief….

You get a glimpse of what liberalism
is really all about with incidents like this.The left, if it could, would take us all into a fascist, totalitarian
state.Obama has told business owners
that they didn’t build it and they needed to pay it forward.Now we see lower level democratic officials
declaring if you disagree with them, you need to go out of business.We saw a lot of those sentiments when
Obamacare declared all businesses had to provide birth control and more at no
cost to their employees.Only a very
narrow exemption was carved out for churches, but none for religious people who
object to what they decreed.Fascism is alive and well in the Democratic
Party.

7. Has Obama Peaked?

Democrats' biggest concern isn't the
economy; it's whether Obama has already peaked. There are numerous reasons
to believe it's true. If true, there are rapidly diminishing opportunities for
the Administration to reverse it, and a growing list that could accelerate it….

…Over
this prolonged pummeling, Romney has not simply endured, he is even with
the incumbent. Shouldn't the incumbent
Obama, who faced no primary and was able to save, focus, and control massively
more resources, have opened up a lead? Has Obama taken his best shot, while
Republicans are still waiting to throw theirs?

There are several indications that
this is true. Presidential reelections are about the incumbent and elected
incumbents overwhelmingly win -- only Carter and Bush I have lost in the last
76 years. Because of this, winning
incumbents increase their popular vote share from their initial election.

Never in U.S, history has a winning
incumbent, in his initial reelection attempt, seen his popular vote percentage
fall. However despite his spending and incumbency advantages, if current polls are correct Obama is
unlikely to come close to reaching his 52.5% of the 2008 popular vote.

Second, in Obama's 2008 victory, most neglected to notice
his win was only an electoral vote landslide and against an opponent with
numerous crippling disadvantages.
McCain failed to unite Republicans, while carrying the burden of two wars and
an economic downturn.

Even more unnoticed was Obama's massive spending advantage. All
told, McCain raised $350 million for his primary and general election
campaigns, while Obama raised $745.7 million. And this huge advantage could be
focused on close states -- further increasing the spending disparity.

While Obama benefitted from a huge
2008 -- and thus far in 2012 -- spending advantage, it is disappearing now. Republican Super PACs have a 3-1 cash on
hand advantage over the Democrats'. Romney also is closing the gap. In May,
Romney outraised Obama $77 million to $60 million and in June, Republicans
raised over $100 million…

…The realization should be emerging
that Obama was not really that strong in
2008, when he massively outspent a disadvantaged opponent. And he is even
weaker now -- despite an early and significant spending advantage -- when
he will be unable to financially overwhelm a stronger opponent. The questions
Democrats must be asking is: Has Obama already peaked? And can he hold on just
long enough?

I do not see Obama’s support growing.He’s in the mid-forties in support right now
and where would an increase come from?

8. The Most Feared Republican

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) is the activist Left’s number one
congressional target this election cycle because he poses an existential threat
to progressivism, a prominent professional left-wing
organizer suggests.

West is “a national rising star in
the Tea Party,” Becky Bond explained during a panel discussion at the Campaign
for America’s Future’s recent Take Back the American Dream confab in
Washington, D.C.

The famously outspoken retired Army
lieutenant colonel with the special talent for getting under Democrats’ skin
“is going to start to define” what the Republican Party stands for, said Bond,
president of the well-funded Credo SuperPAC….

…Under the words “Beyond Crazy,” Credo SuperPAC’s website links to
articles online that trumpet West’s various heresies against political
correctness. Unlike most on the Left, West is unapologetically pro-Israel and pro-life, positions that
probably helped get him maligned as
“racist” and “sexist.”

An Iraq war veteran, West describes
Islam as “a totalitarian theocratic political ideology.” He doesn’t bash the United States for invading Iraq and Afghanistan as
left-wingers are wont to do.

He has said that Fort Hood shooter Army Major Nidal Malik
Hasan, who reportedly said Muslims should “rise up” and attack Americans as
payback for the U.S. war in Iraq, is a
Muslim extremist. This embarrassingly trite assertion is somehow controversial
on the Left. West also refuses to appease terrorism apologists who prefer
to treat Hasan as a mere sufferer of what they call “pre-virtual vicarious Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

Because West supported Rep. Paul
Ryan’s (R-Wisc.) extremely modest budget-balancing proposal, the PAC accused him of voting “to abolish
Medicare.” Because he’s not a member of the manmade global warming cult,
West is labeled a knuckle-dragging flat-earther.

West is being targeted as part of
Credo SuperPAC’s “Take Down the Tea Party Ten” campaign. Eight enemies have been
selected so far. The other Tea Party-friendly Republican congressmen with
bullseyes painted on them are Steve King (Iowa), Dan Lungren (Calif.), Mike
Fitzpatrick (Penn.), Joe Walsh (Ill.), Frank Guinta (N.H.), Sean Duffy (Wisc.),
and Chip Cravaack (Minn.)…

It interesting how the left accuses everyone else of hate,
when their actions define hatred.West
is outspoken and the left considers that a threat.He falls (according to leftists) into the
category of Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox News, etc. as a liar and a hater.The left needs to remember that every time
you point a finger at someone else, three of them are pointing back at yourself.

9. More thuggery on the Left

A
private-school voucher program in Louisiana is set to expand to include more
students than ever, and the teachers’ union is not happy. Last week, the Louisiana Association of Educators (LAE),
the local affiliate of the National Education Association, had its lawyers send
this intimidating notice to a school participating in the newly expanded
voucher program. The message: participating
in this program could get you sued. According to the Advocate, similar letters have been mailed to 95
other participating schools. The lawyers state in the letters that they are
prepared to pursue legal action against schools that participate in the voucher
program because it is, in their estimation, unconstitutional.

The state of Louisiana specifically designed its voucher program, the
Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence, to serve low-income students trapped in failing schools. In order
to qualify for the program, the student had to have attended a school that was
rated “C,” “D,” or “F” by the state accountability system and to have come from
a family that makes less than 250 percent of the federal poverty line.
Originally limited to Orleans Parish, the program is slated to expand statewide
in August 2012. Students are allowed to take the vouchers to private schools,
which do not have unionized teachers, a point of contention for the union….

Monday, July 30, 2012

Story #1 is
today’s sign of desperation from the Obama Campaign.#2 is a poll that shows after all the
negative ads on Mr. Romney’s character, the voters don’t see any difference
between Governor Romney and President Obama.#3 reviews Romney’s speech in Israel.#4 reviews the hope and change for 2012.#5 shows that Obama is lying to himself. #6 is a story about voter fraud.#7 is an excellent article explaining while
2004 and 2012 are totally different.#8
looks a sexual predators who are teaching in our schools.

Today’s
Thoughts

If
you watched the opening ceremony of the London
Olympics you were treated to homage to the NHS (Britain’s National Health
Service).Celebrating the NHS is
definitely a left wing dream as in 2009, it was reported that approximately 300 patients died each year of
malnutrition in British hospital wards. Starving their patients to death is
not good medicine.

It appears Obama’s change on gay marriage has allowed
Democrats to play the bigot card.The
problem is the card is overdrawn and doesn’t
work anymore.

A $38.6
billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would
create or save 65,000 jobs has
created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records
show.The program has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out
almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies. Obama doesn’t have a clue.

Richard Miniter writes that Obama canceled the Osama bin Laden “kill”
missionin January 2011, again in
February, and a third time in March. Obama’s close adviser Valerie Jarrett
persuaded him to hold off each time, according to the book.

1. Signs of Desperation

David Axelrod’s anxiety over
Barak Obama’s reelection chances is now on full display. In the latest personal e-mail
from the Obama campaign, Axelrod starts to act paranoid:

You know what's kind of amazing?

That we're not getting blown
away in the face of unprecedented, unlimited spending from super PACs, Mitt
Romney, and all the other shadowy groups trashing Barack Obama nonstop.

Shadowy
groups? Is he hallucinating? Perhaps his boss has reinstituted the Choom Gang
and Axelrod has been puffing away – the donors to Romney’s campaign and
pro-Romney Super PACs has received consistent and brutal scrutiny.

It’s
worth noting the violent language here. For a campaign that whines about
incivility on a regular basis to use the phrase “blown away” is inconsistent,
to say the least.

Axelrod
continues:

In
June, nearly 80 percent of the money Romney and the Republicans raised came
from just 6 percent of the donations they received -- and that's before we
count the super PACs. The other side relies on fewer people giving more, and
with this year's new rules, it's a lot more.

Even
with all that, we're still in a position of strength heading into the final
three months of this race, thanks to grassroots supporters like you. When I
talk to a reporter or go on TV, I'm damn proud to tell people that….

Mitt Romney holds thin advantages over President Obama on
leadership, personal values and honesty, according to a new poll for The Hill.

The poll, conducted for The Hill by
Pulse Opinion Research, suggests voters see little difference between the
candidates on character issues that Democrats have cited as key to Obama’s
appeal

.

It found 48 percent of voters consider Romney the stronger leader, compared to
44 percent who favored Obama.

Similarly, 47 percent of likely voters also said Romney most shares their values
while 44 percent picked Obama.

When asked which candidate voters
considered more honest and trustworthy, 46 percent said Romney and 44 percent
said Obama — a result within the poll’s 3 percentage point margin of error.

The results may prompt new questions about the effectiveness of the Obama campaign’s
effort to characterize Romney as a calculating former corporate executive who
has little in common with ordinary voters….

If these factors are equal, what’s a voter to do?Perhaps look at Obama’s record over the past
three years?

3. Romney’s Remarkable Speech in
Jerusalem

Mitt Romney, the all-but-official
Republican presidential nominee, delivered
a stem winder of a speech to the Jerusalem Foundation yesterday, packing
emotional support with frank policy statements. The contrast with Obama could
hardly be more dramatic. Indeed, one could go through the speech and note the
many refutations of Obama. For example, the opening comment that “To step foot into Israel is to step foot
into a nation that began with an ancient promise made in this land” directly
contrasts with Obama’s crabbed statement in Cairo about “the aspiration for a
Jewish homeland [being] rooted in a tragic history.”

Also, in contrast to the nonsensical Obama
administration stance on Jerusalem being Israel’s capital — sneaking into change
captions that mistakenly identified it as that and going through verbal
gymnastics to avoid calling it that — Romney
came out and plainly called Jerusalem “the capital of Israel.”…

… But
of the whole speech, it is the final words that most struck me: “May God bless America, and may He bless
and protect the Nation of Israel.” When last did a politician ask the Lord
to protect another country and not his own?

Comments: (1) Obama and
Romney stand as far apart on Israel as they do on the sources of economic
growth. (2) Over and over again, Romney returned to the moral bonds between
the two countries; yes, there are mutual benefits from our connection, but
ultimately it reflects something higher and greater than any of us. (3) If he
is elected, it will be fascinating to watch to what extent the outlook
expressed today will translate to the workaday policy issues. I expect it will
have a substantial effect.

Romney’s trip to Israel is a success by any measure.Perhaps someday Obama can scout out Israel to
see if he and the family should visit it on vacation.

4. Hope for Change

The presidential campaign remains
very close, but some of the polling information must continue to cause alarm in
the Obama campaign. Sixty-five percent
of respondents in a recent Rasmussen Reports poll felt our nation was on the
"wrong track," and surveys by National Public Radio and ABC
News/Washington Post showed similar results. Sixty-four percent of respondents in a recent CBS News poll thought
President Obama's policies have contributed "some" or "a
lot" to the economic turndown. And as the election gets closer, the
president's approval rating continues to lag below the all-important 50% mark
in almost every survey.

Americans are frustrated over
today's economy and worried about the direction of our country. To some degree
they blame Mr. Obama for the weak economy and his policies for stifling
economic growth. But our nation's
overall dissatisfaction can also be attributed to a disappointment in the way
that this president has governed. The
Obama administration has forced policies either by ramming them through
Congress or implementing them unilaterally when lawmakers refused. And Mr. Obama's politics, contrary to his
promise of postpartisanship, have been the most partisan and cynical we have
seen in a long while. All this is obvious in many matters:

• Taxes. Big tax hikes coming in January will serve as dampers on economic
growth.ObamaCare imposes a new 3.8%
tax on investment income. On top of that, if the Bush tax increases aren't
extended, the top income tax rates will rise to 23.8% from 15% on capital gains
and to 43.4% from 15% on dividends….

…• Energy. The American
people hear Mr. Obama talk about a broad energy strategy, but they see an
administration that has attacked the coal industry with onerous regulations, done little or nothing to assist the
natural gas boom, done what it can to slow down oil production, and wasted money on other initiatives that
please green supporters but don't lower the cost of energy.

• Health care. Although
ObamaCare remains unpopular, the Supreme Court ruling upholding it means that a
17% transfer of our economy from the marketplace to the control of the federal
government is coming unless Congress and a President Romney can stop it. At a
time when our nation needs lower taxes and more flexibility in health-care
decisions, ObamaCare has increased taxes
by hundreds of billions of dollars and allowed government to regulate most of our
health care decisions….

So basically what the American people are seeing is that
things cost more, are taxed more while the results are less than what it used
to be.Obama is toast in November.

5. Obama lies again—this time to himself

Mitt Romney's presidential campaign
has been slamming President Obama for a statement he made about the economy in
a recent speech: "We tried our
plan," Obama said, "and it worked." Taken out of context, it
sounds like he is claiming credit for mending the economy. In context, however, it appears that Obama was referring to the Clinton
years as the time when Democrats tried "our plan" -- a plan that
included raising taxes -- and the economy did well.

As we noted last week, this is a
revisionist view of the Clinton era,
which produced its greatest economic boom only after Clinton cut taxes on
high-income investors and inheritors in 1997. But it's not hard to see why
Romney is playing up Obama's quote. It sounds damning because no one in America
believes that Obama's economic plan has worked in any sense of the word -- not
even the president himself can possibly believe it….

The only things Obama has left are lies and he apparently is
doing what Dr. Goebbels said could happen.“If you tell a lie often enough, pretty soon you’ll begin to believe it
yourself.”

6. NAACP
Executive sentence for voter Fraud

While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at
new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive
voter fraud scheme.

In a story ignored by the national media, in April a
Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots.
Sowers is identified on an NAACP website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee.

Sowers received
a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts, but Circuit Court Judge
Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those terms concurrently, according
to the Tunica Times, the only media outlet to cover the sentencing.

Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of
Carrie Collins, Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton
and Eddie Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead
persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross.

In the trial, forensic
scientist Bo Scales testified that Sowers’s DNA was found on the inner seals of
five envelopes containing absentee ballots….

…The NAACP has
had other problems with voter fraud. The NAACP National Voter Fund
registered a dead man to vote in Lake County, Ohio, in 2004. That same year, out of 325 voter registration cards filed
by the NAACP in Cleveland, 48 were flagged as fraudulent.

But the NAACP’s voter fraud record doesn’t approach
that of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. At least 54 individuals employed by or
associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud….

…As in 2004, the incumbent has been
running negative ads against the challenger, hoping to disqualify him as Bill
Clinton disqualified Bob Dole in 1996. Many Democrats think that Barack Obama's
attacks on Mitt Romney's business career will have the same effect that they
think the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads had on John Kerry in 2004.

But, as William Galston of the
Brookings Institution, an alumnus of the Clinton White House, writes in The New
Republic, "the evidence in favor of
all these propositions is remarkably thin."

Galston points out that in 2004 no single issue was as prominent as
the economy is this year and that on
most significant issues George W. Bush had a clear edge by the end of the
campaign. He cites polling evidence that the Swift Boat ads hurt Kerry less
than did Bush ads replaying his March
statement that "I did actually vote for the $87 billion before I voted
against it."…

…But there are at least two other
salient differences between 2004 and 2012.

One is that the 2004 election occurred during a period of unusual stability in American
voting behavior.

In the preceding four congressional
elections, Republicans won between 48 and 51 percent of the popular vote for
the House and Democrats won between 46 and 49 percent. In 2004 the parties'
percentages in both the presidential and congressional popular vote were within
the same narrow ranges.

Since then, voting behavior has been much more volatile. In the last three
congressional elections, Republicans' share of the House popular vote has
ranged from 43 to 52 percent and Democrats' share from 45 to 54 percent.

In 2004, only three states cast
their electoral votes for a different party than in 2000, and the margins were
narrow in all cases.

In other words, almost all voters in
2004 were firmly committed to one party or the other. Bush political supremo
Karl Rove was right in saying there were few uncommitted voters and that his
campaign's big task was to turn out the faithful. The Kerry campaign operated
on the same assumption.

But in recent years, lots of American voters, at least by
historical standards, have flipped from one party to the other, and in both
directions.

The conventional wisdom is that we
know with certainty the identity of the dozen or so battleground states. But
the list has changed since 2008.

In 2008, Obama carried Indiana and
lost Missouri by only 3,903 votes. Today, Indiana and Missouri aren't on
anyone's target list.

In contrast, most analysts'
battleground list this year includes Michigan and Wisconsin, which Obama
carried in 2008 with 57 and 56 percent of the vote…

Getting out the base isn’t enough in 2012.There aren’t enough Democrats to reelect
Obama.Most of the polls that have it
tied or Obama slightly ahead have demographics with the Democrats holding a
7-12 percent advantage over Republican voters.That isn’t going to happen.Right
now Romney is up by approximately 5% with 4-5% undecided.The undecided will break approximately 75%
for Romney which means he’s likely to win by 8% or more.

8. Teacher’s Unions Protect Sexual Predators

By resisting almost any change aimed
at improving our public schools, teachers unions have become a ripe target for
reformers across the ideological spectrum. Even Hollywood, famously sympathetic
to organized labor, has turned on unions with the documentary "Waiting for
'Superman'" (2010) and a feature film, "Won't Back Down," to be
released later this year. But perhaps
most damaging to the unions' credibility is their position on sexual misconduct
involving teachers and students in New York schools, which is even causing
union members to begin to lose faith.

In the last five years in New York City, 97 tenured teachers
or school employees have been charged by the Department of Education with
sexual misconduct. Among the charges substantiated by
the city's special commissioner of investigation—that is, found to have
sufficient merit that an arbitrator's full examination was justified—in the
2011-12 school year:

• An assistant principal at a
Brooklyn high school made explicit sexual remarks to three different girls,
including asking one of them if she would perform oral sex on him.

• A teacher in Queens had a sexual
relationship with a 13-year old girl and sent her inappropriate messages
through email and Facebook.

If this kind of behavior were
happening in any adult workplace in America, there would be zero tolerance. Yet
our public school children are defenseless.

Here's why. Under current New York law, an accusation is first vetted by an
independent investigator. (In New York City, that's the special
commissioner of investigation; elsewhere in the state, it can be an independent
law firm or the local school superintendent.) Then the case goes before an employment arbitrator. The local
teachers union and school district together choose the arbitrators, who in turn
are paid up to $1,400 per day. And therein lies the problem.

For many arbitrators, their livelihood depends on pleasing
the unions (whether the United Federation of
Teachers in New York City, or other local unions). And the unions—believing
that they are helping the cause of teachers by being weak on sexual
predators—prefer suspensions and fines, and not dismissal, for teachers charged
with inappropriate sexual conduct. The effects of this policy are mounting….

There is a major problem with sexual abuse in the public
schools even though you never hear about it. This problem has been estimate by
Carol Shakeshaft as “likely more than
100 times the abuse by [Catholic] priests.”